Monday, July 25, 2011

At Earth Class Mail, we've just recently shipped a client-side UI written 100% in Script#, and we thought people might be interested in the process we used to get there. This post is just an overview of what we did- we'll supplement with more details in future posts. I should throw out some props to the team before I get too far- while my blog ended up being the home for the results, Matt Clay was the one behind most of the cool stuff that happened with this. He recognized early on that Script# represented a new way for us to do things, and drove most of the tooling I describe below. Cliff Bowman was the first to consume all the new tooling and came up with a lot of ideas on how to improve it.

Script# Background

If you haven't run across Script# before, I'm not surprised. It's a tool built by Nikhil Kothari that allows C# to compile down to Javascript. Script# has been around since at least 2007 (probably longer), but has only recently started to be really convenient to use. It lets you take advantage of many of the benefits of developing in a strongly-typed language like C# (compile-time type-checking, method signature checks, high-level refactoring) while still generating very minimal JS that looks like what you wrote originally. If you’d like more background, Matt and I talked about it recently with Scott Hanselman. You can also visit Nikhil's Script# project home.

Import Libraries

The first thing we had to do was write a couple of import libraries for JS libraries we wanted to use that weren't already in the box. Import libraries are somewhat akin to C header files that describe the shape (objects, methods, etc) of the code in the JS library so the C# compiler has something to verify your calls against. The import library does *not* generate any JS at compile-time, it's merely there to help out the C# compiler (as well as everything that goes with that- e.g., Intellisense, "Find References"). Script# ships with a jQuery import library, which hit the majority of what we needed. Since we'd previously decided to use some other libraries that didn't already have Script# import libraries (jQuery Mobile, DateBox, JSLinq), we had to whip out import libraries for them- at least for the objects and functions we needed to call from C#. This was a pretty straightforward process- only took a couple of hours to get what we needed.

Consuming WCF Services

The next challenge was to get jQuery calling our WCF JSON services. Our old JS UI had a hand-rolled service client that we'd have to keep in sync with all our operations and contracts- maintenance fail! Since our service contracts were already defined in C#, we initially tried to just "code-share" them into the Script# projects, but that proved to be problematic for a few reasons. First, the contracts were decorated with various attributes that WCF needs. Since Script# isn't aware of WCF, these attributes would need to be redeclared or #ifdef'd away to make the code compilable by Script#. It ended up not mattering anyway, though, since our service contract signatures weren't directly usable anyway. Since XmlHttpRequest and its ilk are async APIs, our generated service client would have to supply continuation parameters to all service calls (ie, onSuccess, onError, onCancel) which would render the operation signatures incompatible anyway. Our options were to redeclare the service contract (and impl) to be natively async pattern (so they'd have a continuation parameter declared) or to code-gen an async version of the contract interface for the client. We opted for the code-generation approach, as it allowed for various other niceties (e.g., unified eventing/error-handling, client-side partial members that aren't echoed back to the server), and settled on a hybrid C#/T4 code generator that gets wired into our build process. Now we have fully type-checked access to our service layer, and with some other optimizations that we'll talk about later, only a minimal amount of JS gets generated to support it.

jQuery templating

The next challenge was using the new jQuery template syntax. This is a pretty slick new addition to jQuery 1.5 that allows for rudimentary declarative client-side databinding. It works by generating JS at runtime from the templated markup file (very simple regex-based replacements of template tags with JS code)- the templates can reference a binding context object that allows the object's current value to appear when the markup is rendered. While it worked just fine in our new "all-managed" build environment, we had a couple of things we didn't like. The first was that template problems (unbalanced ifs, mis-spelled/missing members, etc) can't be discovered until runtime, when it's either a script error (at best) or a totally blank unrenderable UI (at worst). It also means that managed code niceties like "Find All References" won't behave correctly against code in templates, since they don't target Script#. We decided to make something with similar syntax and mechanics, but that runs at build-time and dumps out Script# code instead of JS. This way, "Find All References" still does the right thing, and we get compile-time checking of the code emitted by the templates. Just like other familiar tools, our template compiler creates a ".designer.cs" file that contains all the code and markup, which is then compiled by the Script# compiler into JS. We get a few added benefits from this approach as well. The code isn't being generated at runtime (as it is with jQuery templates), so we can detect template errors at compile-time. We were also able to add some new template tags for declarative formatting, control ID generation, and shortcutting resource access.

Resourcing

Next, we wanted to consume resources from .resx files using the same C# class hierarchy available in native .NET apps. Even though Script# has a little bit of resource stuff built in, Matt whipped up a simple build-time T4-based resx-to-Script# code generator that also added a few niceties (automatic enum-string mapping, extra validation).

Visual Studio/Build integration

Currently, all this stuff is wired up through pre/post-build events in Visual Studio, and some custom MSBuild work. We're looking at ways we could get it a little more tightly integrated, as well as having it work as a "custom tool" in VS2010 to allow save-time generation of some of the code rather than build-time.

Summary

Combining Script# with a bit of custom tooling allows for a new way of writing tight client-side JS that looks a lot more like ASP.NET or Winforms development, and offers many of the same conveniences. Nobody on our team wants to write naked JS any more- to the point that we're actually working on tooling to convert our existing JS codebase to Script#, so we can start to clean it up and make changes with all the C# features we've come to expect from client-side development. Obviously, some manual work will still be required to get everything moved over, but our team really believes that this is the wave of the future.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

At work, we just shipped our first major new chunk of UI in a couple of years, written 100% in Script#. We've been watching Script# for a few years as an interesting option for creating client-side UI, and it recently hit a level of functionality where we felt it was workable. It also coincided nicely with our need for a mobile UI (a standalone product that we could roll out slowly, low-risk compared to changing our bread-and-butter desktop UI).

A little history

When we first started working on a .NET rewrite of the LAMP-based Earth Class Mail (aka Remote Control Mail) in 2007, the client-side revolution was in full force. All the cool kids were eschewing server-side full page postback UI in favor of Javascript client UI. We recognized this from the start, but also had very tight shipping timelines to work under. ComponentArt had some nifty-looking products that promised the best of both worlds- server-side logic with client-side templating, data-binding, and generated Javascript. This fit perfectly with our team's server-side skillset (we didn't have any JS ninjas at the time), so we jumped on it. While we were able to put together a mostly client-side UI in a matter of months, it really didn't live up to the promise. The generated JS and ViewState was very heavy, causing the app to feel slow (Pogue and other reviewers universally complained about it). Also, the interaction between controls on the client was very brittle. Small, seemingly unimportant changes (like the order in which the controls were declared) made the difference between working code and script errors in the morass of generated JS. At the end of the day, we shipped pretty much on time, but the result was less than stellar, and we'd already started making plans for a rewrite.

V2: all JS

Fast-forward to summer of 2009, when we shipped a 25k+ line all-JS jQuery client UI rewrite (which also included an all-new WCF webHttpBinding/JSON service layer). While it was originally planned to be testable via Selenium, JSUnit, and others, things were changing too fast and the tests got dropped, so it was months of tedious manual QA to get it out the door. User reception of the new UI was very warm, and we iterated quickly to add new features. However, refactoring the new JS-based UI was extremely painful due to the lack of metadata. We mostly relied on decent structure and "Ctrl-f/Ctrl-h" when we needed to propagate a service contract change into the client. Workable, but really painful to test changes, and there were inevitably bugs that would slip through when someone did something "special" in the client code. It got to a point where we were basically afraid of the codebase, since we couldn't refactor or adjust without significant testing pain, so the client codebase stagnated somewhat.

On to Script#

We'd been watching our user-agent strings trend mobile for awhile, and this summer it finally reached a point where we needed to own a mobile UI. Our mobile story to this point consisted of users running the main browser UI on mobile devices with varying degrees of success (and a LOT of zooming), and an iPhone app that a customer wrote by reverse-engineering our JSON (we later helped him out by providing the service contracts, since he was filling a void we weren't). The question came to how would we build a new mobile UI? Bolting it to our existing JS client wasn't attractive to anyone, as it's grown unwieldy and scary, and we didn't want to risk destabilizing it with a bunch of new mobile-only code. The prospect of another mass of JS code wasn't attractive to anyone. Another ECM architect (Matt Clay) had been watching Script# for quite awhile, and it had just recently added VS2010 integrated code editing (used to be a standalone non-intellisense editor that ran inside VS2008) and C# 2.0 feature support (generics, anonymous methods). These features gave us enough pause to take another look, and after a week or so of experimentation, we decided to try and ship the mobile UI written with Script#. I'll post something soon that describes what the end result looks like.